Shop Talk (30 page)

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Touched

Mrs. Auerbach was drunk again.

In the five years that Adam Blessing had worked for her, he had seen her drunk only once or twice a week. Things were getting worse lately; she was seldom sober. This Saturday afternoon in early May was her sixth consecutive day on the bottle. As usual she arrived at The Autograph Mart a moment or so before closing.

Adam had been calling her since noon about the customer for “The Lucy Baker Album.”

“Where the customer is, Adam?” she asked, huffing and puffing her way across the floor of the basement shop.

Her habit was to eat a whole roll of peppermint life savers as she made her way from her apartment on Second Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. It was a distance of three city blocks in a straight line, as straight as Mrs. Auerbach could manage.

“The customer,” he said flatly, “is gone! He was in three times last week, twice this week. He won’t be back.”

“Goodt! He doesn’t want it enough! I don’t want to sell it to him anyway! That is a law, Adam!”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Adam. “Why don’t we just make it a law that we don’t sell anything to anyone?”

The old woman ignored the sarcasm. With considerable effort she lowered herself to the folding chair before the card table which was her desk. She blew at some dust on top of old papers there. “Collectors do not interest me, Adam.” She pulled a bottle of rum out of the wire wastebasket under the card table, and set it in front of her. “A customer must love what he buys from me, enough to come back a hundred times if he has to! To collectors I don’t sell! Adam, they are worse than parasites, these collectors! They are saprophytes, who off the dead live!” She unscrewed the cap of the rum bottle. “Well, that collector is not going to live off Lucy Baker!” she said, and she punctuated it with a long swallow of rum.

Adam said, “We aren’t going to live off her either.”

Mrs. Auerbach was fat and in her late sixties. She always wore sweaters and skirts, even in the hot months, and silk stockings with ankle socks over them, and low black oxfords which were always polished. Her garters never reached above her knees. They were rolled to a stop an inch below her skirt. Her hair was a peculiar orange shade from the self-administered rinses. She wore it long, past her shoulder blades, and when she thought about it, she tied it in place with a piece of rough, brown wrapping cord. Today, she had not thought about it. She kept blowing at it from the sides of her wrinkled mouth, trying to keep it out of her eyes. Often when Adam was confronted with her dishevelment, he was reminded of the way she never dotted her
i’
s or crossed her t’
s
—bald proof of her absent-minded carelessness.

“So!” she said, setting the bottle back on the card table with a thud. “The City wins, no, Adam?”

Adam knew it was starting—another of Mrs. Auerbach’s harangues against the city of New York. They were going to tear down the apartment house where she had lived for over thirty years. Already she was the only tenant remaining in the building; the gas and electricity had been turned off a week ago. Adam knew this was one of the reasons she was drinking so heavily lately. He sneaked a look at his wrist watch. Five past five. His date with Dorothy Schackleford was for six-fifteen at the Roosevelt Hotel.

“Mrs. Auerbach—” he tried, but she waved his words away with her pudgy hand.

She said: “I saw you. You are rushing so much all the time! All the time watching your clock, ah, Adam? Hasn’t that been the trouble with the business, your rushing? In this business, no one rushes and makes one dime! You rush like the City rushes!”

“You never even arrive here until five o’clock, Mrs. Auerbach. Don’t forget that.”

“I once thought I would make you my beneficiary. You are young, you could carry on the business, but no! You rush too much! I leave the whole shooting match to the Universal Committee on Conversation!”

“Conservation!” Adam corrected her.

It was her favorite threat, to cut him out of her will. Adam wondered if she even had a will. It was a five o’clock threat, when she wanted him to sit and drink rum with her, and listen to her curse Commercialism, Collectors, Waste, Progress and the City. Her mood could just as easily swing, in a matter of minutes. Then she would offer Adam the autograph album which had belonged to Goethe’s son, or she would announce to Adam that she was planning to adopt him legally as her son and heir, or she would inform him that it was the U.C.C. she was cutting from her will, because they were doing nothing about topsoil research. She was magniloquent in both moods, either offering Adam the world, or offering to pull it out from under him. There was no in-between, such as an offer of an extra five-dollar raise. Adam was still making the measly seventy-five dollars a week he had been earning for the past two years.

“Everything to the Universal Committee on Conservation!” she babbled on. “They want to preserve, Adam! You don’t want to preserve! What do you care if some unprincipled saprophyte walks in to buy ‘The Lucy Baker Album?’ You would sell it in a blink of the eye!”

Adam sighed and walked across to his desk, starting to clear away the day’s work. He said, “You know nothing about the man who wanted to buy that album.”

“Where he is? Not here. Ah? He wants to buy, but he has no time to wait! I would sell it to him under no circumstances!”

“You’re stubborn,” said Adam. “Just stubborn!”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Yah, nothing! I heard you under your breath! You and the City! Same birds!” She took another swallow of rum. “ ‘Remember well and bear in mind, that a true friend is hard to find.’ ”

It was a verse from “The Lucy Baker Album.”

“So is a good living hard to find,” said Adam.

“Quit the whole shooting match if you don’t like it! Anyway, you’re fired! I fired you a hundred times, and you don’t get it through your head!”

“All we sell any more,” Adam said, “is autographs. We haven’t sold an autograph album in seven months!”

“Sell all the autographs you want to,” said Mrs. Auerbach, holding the rum bottle to the light to see its level. “Who cares for an old slip of paper with Button Gwinnett scrawled on it? Ah? Yah, worth money, but who cares for it? And all the other signers of your Declaration to Independence! Some independence when the City comes to wreck your home!”

“ ‘The Lucy Baker Album’ could have paid for a whole remodeling job here,” Adam grumbled.

Mrs. Auerbach chuckled. “I hate to sell the albums, Adam. The autograph books—there’s where my heart is. The
Stammbuchs,
with all their sweet sentiments! There’s the heart in this business, and you would sell it! Sell Button Gwinnett’s
schlimm
signature, but leave me my heart!”

“Never mind,” said Adam. “Sunday I’ll look in the
Times
for something. Some other work!”

Mrs. Auerbach did not raise her eyes from the rum bottle. She had heard that before. She knew how Adam loved The Mart. For Adam too, the autograph books were the most interesting part of the business. He loved to study the handwriting of the people who wrote in them; handwriting analysis had become his hobby. He enjoyed imagining the friendships, love affairs, and family relationships, and more than often he could pick out the most sinister dips and loops written in some of the saccharine and homely verses; as well as the contrary in some of the most dull and proper entries. Adam had never had a knack for making friends; love was a word which still sounded clumsy and joyless on his tongue. He had been raised in the Cayuga County Orphans’ Home, in upstate New York, and the closest he had ever come to having a family was his hero-worship of a very wealthy man in the city. But this same man had a son of his own with whom Adam had never succeeded in getting along; the son, in fact, had been the blight of Adam’s young years, always teasing him and showing him up. Adam had come away from upstate New York with a fierce embarrassment at having been an orphan. Often, with strangers, he invented a family; more than often he pretended to be the son of that rich man, using this masquerade only in the very unimportant moments—riding on a train or a bus, or having a drink beside someone in a bar. It was a little peculiarity of Adam’s, and he did it without thinking, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do. Usually he kept his own name, but there had been times when he went the limit, and said his name was Billy Bollin.

Mrs. Auerbach was the only person with whom he had ever discussed his past in detail, and honestly. She was old and warm and sentimental, in her better moments, and, he supposed, slightly daffy as well, but Adam could talk to her. When he had first come to New York and taken this job with her at The Mart, they had spent many long hours talking together. Mrs. Auerbach could carry on forever over a rum bottle, but never once had she told Adam anything about her past.

At twenty-four, Adam Blessing was a little under six feet, with strong muscles he had worked hard to develop, a pleasant manner, and a good appearance—which had also involved work. As a youngster he had been very fat, and far from neat; he had been slow in school, and the dolt of his classmates. The course he had run since leaving Auburn, New York had not been an easy one; it had been all uphill. He had enrolled in numerous adult education classes given in high schools around the city. He had taken speech and shorthand, a semester of German, art appreciation, music appreciation, ballroom dancing, economics, a course in business management and one in personality. He was not as shy as he used to be, and he was meticulous about combing his white-blond hair and parting it in a somewhat old-fashioned way on the far left side. He kept himself scrubbed clean, nails clipped, clothes pressed and immaculate. His face was not overly-endowed by Nature with perfect features, but he had a good nose and excellent teeth, which compensated for lips that were on the small side, and eyes that were a dull, yellowish brown, Adam could easily be taken for a school teacher, a seminary student, a teller in a bank; or for exactly what he was—Mrs. Auerbach’s clerk.

This outward appearance of mild-mannered introversion was misleading. Adam Blessing was ambitious. His ambitions kept him awake nights, sent him on long walks through dawn-deserted city streets, and kept him writing letter after letter after letter to manufacturers, corporations, agencies and any number of private enterprises. He was a world of ideas without an axis on which to revolve. When his letters received any replies at all, they were simply polite acknowledgments; more frequently they were ignored. Adam imagined that they were probably laughed at, and often, just after he mailed one of his letters, his cheeks would smart with frustration and humiliation as he imagined the letter arriving, and being ridiculed. His ideas for a way to improve paper clips, for children’s games, for advertising copy, for packaging pickles and olives in lighter containers, for promoting books and for publishing more readable newspapers—all of Adam’s ideas were unrealized. He needed money; even ideas for making money cost money. That fact was his dead end.

Waking and sleeping, he dreamed of having money, but in those moments of stark reality when he was face to face with the glaring light of truth, he became resigned and somewhat bitter. He was Adam Blessing, no matter if he could see his reflection only hazily in the mirror behind the bar, no matter if the stranger beside him did put his beer down, shake his hand and say: “Glad to know you, Mr. Bollin.”

After he had piled his correspondence neatly and rolled down the top of his desk, he glanced across at Mrs. Auerbach. She was humming a waltz. Some of the rum had dribbled down the front of her red sweater from the sides of her mouth, and her legs were spread in a careless fashion, so that Adam could see up to the long pink silk bloomers she wore; could see the jelly-fat-flabby thighs. He had seen her that way too many times to figure, but each time he was reminded of the only glimpse of his own mother which his memory retained. He was not even certain of how old he was, but he must have been very young, for it was some time before he had been taken to the Home. He was in a kitchen with her. She had been washing clothes at the sink on a hot day, and she had plopped herself down on a straight-backed wooden chair, in the same posture as Mrs. Auerbach’s now. He had not been too young to feel a certain shame at being able to see up her skirt. She was not fat like Mrs. Auerbach. Adam could not remember her face. But he did remember something she said to him. Her tone was sarcastic. Adam liked to think that it was a sarcasm striped with a certain disappointment about something Adam had nothing to do with, but he could not be positive of that. He only knew for sure that she had looked at him and said, “And a lot
you
care!”

That was the only memory Adam had of a parent.

Mrs. Auerbach’s mood had swung now. She was telling Adam that she was leaving him everything when she passed on. Adam was convinced she would leave it to dogs and cats, the Committee on Conservation, or perhaps some imaginary committee of her own, to fight the city of New York. He sometimes wondered what happened to an old woman’s money when she had no beneficiary; but whatever did happen, and whoever did take over the business, Adam was sure he would be asked to stay on. In addition, he was sure his position would be a more important one. He knew as much about the stock at The Mart as Mrs. Auerbach did, and he had hundreds of ideas for making the place a success. Mrs. Auerbach was simply not interested in the business any more, despite her occasional harangues to the contrary. Whoever took over the business—and even in Adam’s dreams he discounted himself, for he knew the old woman and her crazy ways—the new owner would need Adam. It would be a matter of time. Adam would be given more responsibility and more money, and while he would probably not get rich, he would have enough, he was sure …

Drunk or sober, Mrs. Auerbach embraced strangeness with the unreasoning enthusiasm of the certifiable eccentric. Adam knew that she often picked through city litter baskets for strange souvenirs—an old box, a hat band—once, the wheel of a baby carriage. It had been reported to Adam, by other shopkeepers along Fifty-seventh Street, that she kept thousands of dollars in used sardine tins in her icebox; and Adam was very used to seeing the jar of pepper she carried at all times, to ward off thieves.